Mia Papas named Value Institute director of Clinical Research and Health Outcomes

Mia Papas, Ph.D., has been appointed director of Clinical Research and Health Outcomes within the Christiana Care Health System Value Institute.

Papas’ leadership responsibilities include providing mentorship to Value Institute investigators and scholars, as well as expert service line consultation.

She is known to many at Christiana Care for her work as a research mentor and consultant in Emergency Medicine. She has taught numerous courses in the fields of epidemiology, public health, biostatistics and applied data analysis. She is an active member of the American Public Health Association and the American College of Epidemiology.

She has had a long-standing interest in the science of population health with several focused interests, including maternal and child health, cancer control and prevention, and health disparities. The central theme across these three areas of investigation is the application of epidemiologic methods to identify the social and behavioral characteristics of communities and individuals that influence population health.

Papas is actively engaged in research focused on the role of maternal dietary factors in influencing child obesity, premature mortality among those with severe mental illness, and health disparities experienced by those with physical and emotional disabilities.

Her analytical expertise includes experimental and observational study designs, big-data analytic methods, the assessment of validity and reliability of screening tools, sample size and statistical power, the analysis of longitudinal data, hierarchical linear modeling, the use of geographic information systems in understanding the effect of place on health and health behaviors, factor analysis, survival analysis, and multivariate logistic and linear regression.

She has received numerous honors and awards for mentoring and teaching and has held several academic appointments with the University of Delaware and Drexel University.

She received her Bachelor of Science in mathematics, cum laude, from Fairfield University, a Master of Science in epidemiology and biostatistics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

She has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed articles, has successfully obtained funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and has presented her research at more than 80 National and International conferences.